Douglass saw Lincoln not as a savior but as a collaborator, with more ardent activists including the enslaved themselves, in ending slavery. With so much more to do, he hoped that the Emancipation statue would empower African Americans to define Lincoln’s legacy for themselves. “In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator,” he said at the conclusion of his dedication speech, “we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us.”
That’s us: an unsettled nation occupying concentric circles around a memorial that Douglass saw as unfinished. The incompleteness is what prompted the critique and “suggestion” he made in the letter we found written to the Washington National Republican, a Republican publication that Douglass, who lived in D.C., would have read. “Admirable as is the monument by Mr. Ball in Lincoln park,” he began, “it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.”
Douglass had spoken beneath the cast bronze base that reads “EMANCIPATION,” not “emancipator.” He understood that process as both collaborative and incomplete. “The mere act of breaking the negro’s chains was the act of Abraham Lincoln, and is beautifully expressed in this monument,” his letter explained. But the 15th Amendment and black male suffrage had come under President Ulysses S. Grant, “and this is nowhere seen in the Lincoln monument.” (Douglass’ letter may be implying that Grant, too, deserved a monument in Lincoln Park; some newspaper editors read it that way in 1876.)
Douglass’s main point was that the statue did not make visible “the whole truth” that enslaved men and women had resisted, run away, protested and enlisted in the cause of their own freedom. Despite its redesign, the unveiled “emancipation group” fell far short of this most important whole truth.
“The negro here, though rising,” Douglass concluded, “is still on his knees and nude.” The longtime activist’s palpable weariness anticipated and predicted ours. “What I want to see before I die,” he sighed, “is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”
And so his suggestion: Lincoln Park, two blocks wide and one block long, has room for another statue.